A Lesson on Circumstance
by pandamo
Summary: On his journey to Kyoshi Island to meet his son, Sokka learns a thing or two about the unpredictability of life.


The remarkable thing about Sokka, Sokka thought to himself three years later, was his adaptability to any situation—his concrete malleability in the face of resolute unpredictability. Years of mischief in the name of law and order in his youth—accompanied by his sister and, more importantly, the one-and-only brother-in-law, the Avatar, cohort and associate—had trained him in the untrainable: they forced down his throat the idea that predictability was moot. Riding the tumultuous waves in the ocean of circumstance, as it happened, was most assuredly more enjoyable than waiting for them to hit you. On the other hand... the waves were not so easily ridden.

It all started when, three years before his rather trivial realization, he was assaulted—no, _mauled_—by a badger-mole cub named Beifong. But let's backtrack a little bit.

"I'll have another," Sokka had said. "On the rocks."

Eleven years ago, he'd pissed his pants less than a mile from here after Aang had rescued him and a multitude of others from the ethereal bamboo thickets of the Spirit World. He snorted in remembrance of hastily finding a pond to discreetly bathe in. Shortly after Zuko and Kuei's ascension to their respective thrones, Senlin Village had gone and exploded into Senlin City, gleefully reaping the overabundant benefits of free, _safe_ trade with all three nations—as did many other settlements on the many other rivers leading to post-war Ba Sing Se. Silk, once forcibly and violently monopolized by the Fire Nation, was easily cultivated on the newly cleared land around the boomtown, and few were shy of wriggling into the blossoming market. More importantly to Sokka, the drinks were lovely.

The girl behind the counter smiled coyly and got to work on his drink. He didn't know what the locals called the yellow, bitter liquid, but he savored how sharply it burned on the way down and how it made his head spin and how he slowly forgot his troubles the more it cut down his throat. It was cheap and cold, and the bartender was an attractive one, and that was enough for Sokka.

She wasn't exactly _beautiful_, Sokka thought, but definitely physically attractive; she played more to her sexuality than her personality, and she was well aware of her appearance. She knew how to do her job well, dancing amorously along the steaming line between diffident and forward, and evidently it was working, because he wasn't even done with his fourth drink and he was ordering the fifth because he liked the way she smirked when he tossed the coins her way. She twisted her fingers and some of the honey-colored drink solidified into hard ice.

So close to the South Pole, she played the Water Tribe act, with her waterbending and scantily worn blue attire and braided hair, but at home, she probably let the braids out and changed into brown and green, just like any other Earth Kingdom migrant. Taking advantage of her geography—that's what she did, Sokka thought, and she did it well.

Really, for Senlin, it was a classy bar, and one of the first he'd encountered for quite a while carrying only meager rust on the supports and only meager rot on the floor. The drink was good, the music was decent, and Sokka was fairly certain that the company wouldn't be terrible if he cared enough to engage them, but he didn't. It was a tavern-restaurant mix, and though Sokka hadn't eaten the food there, it smelled alright. There were two major areas in the place: the first, the alcohol section where he sat, and the second, the dining area to his left that rose several feet from the ground. A humble staircase with only three steps connected the two, but Sokka was happy he was on this side, because it was quiet, and he could stare at the waterbender's breasts when she let him think he was being discreet. Business as usual, they both thought.

It was, trivially, his twenty-seventh birthday, and he didn't particularly wish to be found—searched for as he probably was by Katara and Aang, Sokka just wasn't in the mood for parties or his friends' unrelenting attempts to cheer him up. He was on his way to meet his newborn son on Kyoshi that Suki had waited nine months to tell him about. His newborn son that was already named—the one that Suki, despite her lengthy detailing on the finer points of how she would be raising him alone, neglected to mention the name of. He wondered if his boy was going to look like him, or if Suki was going to get that, too.

Despite their best wishes, the two of them had carried a short and passionate tryst that spring borne of lust—an acute desire for the flavor of physical contact like that of their teenage years, and when they woke up the next morning they stayed as intimately wrapped as they were until the reality of their years-old separation seeped in. And the result of that rendezvous now awaited him on Kyoshi Island. Soon enough, he would have to tell his brother-in-law and sister that they had a nephew, tell his father of his new grandson...

_To Republic City we go—  
We go!  
The city without pain or woe—  
We go!_

Sokka cringed the moment that the posse of inflated men in the corner, absolutely sloshed and swaying like overgrown weeds in the breeze, began their pathetic attempt at harmonization. So much for quiet, he sighed internally. The Water Tribe diplomat hadn't heard this particular tune before, but the overall message was the same as always: a gross oversimplification of the liberties the city provided and a gross disregard for its problems, blinded by the idealist tales fabricated by those who had never been there themselves. They did nothing but build Aang's hard-earned accomplishments to the point that they could only collapse into disappointment after being experienced first-hand.

_Where the drinks all run cold  
And the tits are paroled  
To Republic City we go—  
We go!_

The burly man next to Sokka slammed his drink on the lumpy table in frustration, and some of the yellow drink spilled over. "Oi!" he bellowed thunderously and turned to face them. "Shut your traps, would you? I can't hear myself think over your damned yodeling!"

His jet-black beard ran down to his substantially large belly, his locks down to his shoulders. A bushy mustache the likes of which Sokka could only dream of growing one day hung from his lip in braids under his fat nose. Everything about the man was fat—including his biceps. His green tunic was filthy. Classy bar indeed.

The alpha male of the singing group behind stood so fast that it knocked his chair to the ground with a _thump, _very clearly not amused by the interruption of his wonderful song.

"What did you just say to me, old man?" he growled indignantly as he rolled his sleeves up. The silence was suffocating, and Sokka very much wanted to get away from the whole ordeal without distracting the men from their very important business, but he couldn't find an easy way to do so, and with a sigh he realized that the cute bartender had vanished.

The instigator beside him looked the other ruffian in the eyes and the two of them had what was by Sokka's standards a very awkward staring contest before the first man took his drink, threw it to the ground as hard as he could and watched it explode on the floor, and made his way out of the bar in a huff. The other alpha male looked rather perplexed, and watched him leave in a confused, drunken stupor. The cronies had already started bellowing the song again.

Unfortunately for the Water Tribe diplomat, the man caught his eye and, judging by the way the other man's expression lit up with clarity, had the nerve to actually recognize him. _Dammit. _Sokka turned around rather promptly and, desperately hoping that the man would forget about him, went back to staring at the waitress who had suddenly reappeared since the brawl that had almost taken place moments earlier.

"Hey, you're Sokka of the Water Tribe, aren't you?" Sokka nodded, and the man cracked a grin and moved far too comfortably into his personal space. "You taught the Avatar everything he knows!"

Sokka shrugged. "I'd be lying if I said I didn't."

"Hey guys, check it out—it's that Sokka guy!" _Oh great..._ The man's sidekicks scrambled over and began assaulting him with a multitude of asinine questions.

"_Is your sister really the most beautiful woman in the world?"_

"_What's the Avatar like? Haven't you met him?"_

"_Are you a bloodbender?"_

Sokka groaned. "No, he's great, and no," he grumbled. "Now will you leave me alone?" How was he going to stew in his own drunken misery if these idiots kept talking to him?

The alpha male furrowed his brow, then put on a mischievous grin. "We'll leave you alone if you take us with you to Republic City."

Sokka rolled his eyes. "What, are we children again? Why can't you go there yourself?"

"Because," the man pouted, "we don't have any passports. You're _Sokka_, though," he appended as if Sokka didn't already know. "You could get us in without any passports!"

"You don't need passports to get into Republic City," Sokka deadpanned. He could taste the alcohol on his breath.

The man paused. "Are you sure? The man at the boats said we needed a passport..."

Sokka sighed. "Trust me, I would know—"

"It's not like we can leave yet anyway!" one of the cronies interjected with a whine. "We still have to take care of... _the job._"

A job? Sokka needed money. He'd packed up his things in Republic City in such a drunken, outraged, heartbroken fit that he didn't pack much—and it was probably better that way to begin with. A traveler had no business packing enough money to wander halfway around the world and back. Without soldiers and war ships scattered across the sea and countryside, bandits and pirates had been on the steady rise, and most of them had bending abilities that Sokka did not. While he had become rather proficient at finding ways to outsmart benders instead of outfight them, it wasn't a risk he was inclined to take.

"What's this job?" Sokka asked in an attempt to avoid slurring his words too terribly.

"A giant badger-mole came down from the mountains out west—"

"A giant badger-mole _cub,_" one of the other men interjected. The alpha male looked at him slowly.

"Fine. A giant badger-mole _cub_ came down from the mountains out west," the man corrected shortly, "and has been stealing and destroying and causing a general ruckus around town. We're supposed to go take care of him."

"What does _take care of him _mean?" Sokka asked.

"Get him to go away or kill him," he explained in response. "Depends on the reaction."

Sokka thought for a moment and sighed. "I'll tell you what," he said. "Let me in on this badger-mole gig and give me some of the cut, and I'll take you to Republic City after I get back from Kyoshi Island. I've... got some business to attend to."

The other men agreed without thinking, hardly able to contain their joy that they would not only be traveling to Republic City, but they would get to work with Sokka of the Water Tribe. _The _Sokka. Maybe at the end of the whole ordeal, they would get to meet Avatar Aang himself! They shivered with excitement. They were going places.

The next morning found them patrolling the west side of the city and severely regretting having so much to drink the night before. Their headaches and photosensitivity were brutal in their punishment of the mens' overindulgence and stopped at nothing to remind them at every step of their poor choices the previous night. So be it, Sokka thought. At least it got him some cash.

The road was a gravel one that meandered casually to the mountains of the west. Everything was of a various shade of yellow: the soil, the tall and itchy grass, the autumn trees, the mountains that loomed in the distance, pushing beyond the clouds in a way that seemed so unimpressive after visiting the Southern Air Temple. It was beautiful in its own calming way; not breathtaking, but a view that made one think about his or her place in the world after looking for too long—a permeating serenity that seeped into his pores from all directions, carrying away with the wind the inane chatter of his companions and allowing him to listen to the birds with little interruption. Initially, the men bombarded him relentlessly with questions of any and all subjects, but they eventually got the hint that he wasn't up for much conversation.

It wasn't that he felt too superior to talk to them—he was just thinking about his son. He needed more of that yellow drink.

It was lunchtime and he would have rather been eating than punishing his legs on such a hike. His surroundings were slow in their march by him, and he wished that damned badger-mole cub would show up so he could grab his cash and haul ass out of Senlin City, but the aggressive and destructive animal apparently wasn't keen on showing its face on the one day that Sokka might have actually benefited from it.

"Tell me about this badger-mole cub," Sokka said. The men looked at him in surprise, indulging themselves in the mellifluous, deep tones of his voice. The man was a god, the others thought.

"We call her Beifong," the alpha-male said. "Powerful earthbender, strong, deaf, and extremely stubborn. Flattened a dozen houses looking for something to eat a few days ago." Sokka looked at him. "No offense to Lady Toph," he appended with a nervous stutter.

Sokka shrugged. "She'd take it as a compliment."

"Right..."

Within the hour, Sokka was starving, and his party must have heard his stomach rumble, because it wasn't long before they stopped for lunch. He took the closest boulder as a seat. It was a small clearing to the right of the road with a creek that trickled closeby. Roots jutted from the dry, yellow soil. A large cliff rose from the other side of the path, at least three men tall and covered with jagged rocks protruding from its dusty surface.

From his pack, Sokka grabbed a small meat wrap made the way his mother and Katara used to make them, licked his lips, and was about to take a precious bite when he heard a muffled smash from across the road against the cliffside. He looked to the source of the noise, and when nothing seemed out of the ordinary, again attempted a bite before he was once more interrupted by a loud smash.

This time it was much louder and had gleaned the attention of the other men in his crew. Dust clouded around the rock face, shrouding it in a swirling, thickening veil of yellow particles. The rumbles became more constant and became louder, and Sokka realized with a sharply increasing heart rate that if there was ever a time to prepare for battle, this was probably it. With a longing, wistful expression, he put away his meat wrap and unsheathed his sword.

The rumbling was deafening now, his headache piercing his mind relentlessly with each resonant shake before from the cliffside burst an absolutely enormous badger-mole, almost as large as those Sokka remembered in the Cave of Two Lovers, her teeth pulled into a furious snarl, and Sokka hardly had time to think about how this looked _nothing _like a cub before one of Beifong's front paws twisted and a horrifically broad column of earth began shooting towards him.

He twisted out of the way, lamenting his inability to simply cut through the rock like his space sword could have, and thought for a few crucial seconds about his options. The other men had already drawn their weapons, quickly realizing that the idea of a nonviolent victory was laughable, and Sokka remembered how the alpha-male in the group said that Beifong was deaf, essentially destroying his ability to soothe the beast with a mediocre guitar tune like his last encounter with a badger-mole.

But Beifong took advantage of his moment of thoughtful apprehension, stomping her foot and sending all of the men high into the air. Sokka scrambled to latch onto a lone tree branch that didn't appear sturdy enough to fully support his body weight, let alone with a sizeable downward velocity, but it was better than smacking into the ground with nothing to slow him. Miraculously, the branch weakly supported his form, and with one arm holding desperately to his lifeline, he took advantage of the beast's distraction with the mediocre earthbending of one of his allies and used the other arm to hurl his sword at the raging brute's left leg—the one it seemed most comfortable bending with.

Sure enough, the sword slashed through the badger-mole's knee, and in response the raging animal pushed itself onto its hind legs in a furious and deafening roar, and the alpha-male used this moment of angry weakness to sink its supporting legs into the ground with some quick earthbending. The branch holding Sokka creaked and abruptly snapped, dropping Sokka through the air and onto his feet where he used the branch to swing at the beast's head. But the animal knocked the branch out of the way and swatted at Sokka in the chest with an irate growl. Blood spurted from the wound and blackness seeped into his vision, but he persisted in a backwards roll, equipping his boomerang from its strap on his back.

By then, Beifong had already dislodged her hind legs from the ground and knocked Sokka's companions unconscious, and the dread that sat in his gut seemed to only thicken and coagulate into sheer terror as the beast slid across the ground towards him. So this is how he would die, he thought miserably. To an insane badger-mole on his way to meet his son that the mother of which hadn't informed him of until birth. Katara would make Aang go to the Spirit World and kill him again for his stupidity. In a last ditch effort, he launched his boomerang with all his might towards the terrifying creature and watched despondently as it only dazed his enemy for a few moments.

He closed his eyes, concentrating on the pain in his chest, and waited for the final blow. But the blow never came.

He opened his eyes and from his periphery smashed an enormous brown blur into the approaching badger-mole cub that knocked it to the side before it could make its supposedly inevitable kill. The two gargantuan figures rolled together in a clawing match of roars and growls and hisses, slamming into the rock face and producing an audible yelp from the badger-mole as they twisted and turned.

Recovering from the shock of _not _dying, Sokka sat upright and scrambled through the clearing, desperately trying to ignore the incredibly sharp pain from the bloody number on his chest as he made his way to his sword which lay supine in the dust. He looked up as his shaky hand grasped the blade and his eyes focused ahead where the badger-mole stood before the figure that saved him, clawing and scratching and clubbing its way through the defenses of her opponent.

Sokka recognized this as a rare opportunity and began an arduous crawl to the battle scene with his blade, both fueled and hindered by the vicious pain in his pectorals and the terrifying noises produced by the two creatures he moved towards. For such a short distance, it was a difficult journey, each movement of his limbs reverberating into an aggressive throb in his chest, punctuated further by the jagged rocks strewn across the grassy and dusty earth.

Finally, he reached his destination and looked up to the massive badger-mole that had an arm lifted in preparation of a fatal strike to the beast below it. Desperately, Sokka thrust his blade upwards into the throat of the distracted beast, cringing at the way it hissed and screamed and the way the blood spurted from the wound, down his arm and down his chest. Beifong shook in agony for a few moments before giving a final shudder, as if conceding an ultimate defeat, and fell on its side.

He would decidedly _not _be telling this story to Aang.

He panted for a few moments and watched the beast that both saved and was saved by himself stand lethargically. Four bony legs protruded from its enormous, tree-bark colored body with a sizeable head, a rather beautiful mane, and impressively large teeth. More noticeably, two huge antlers jutted from its head.

It was a saber tooth moose-lion. A strikingly familiar one, at that...

Sokka let out an awed and exasperated laugh in recognition of the animal that saved him, and he reached hesitantly towards the beast, reluctant to be attacked by yet another gargantuan monster. Fortunately, it accepted his ministrations happily, purring into his hand with a contented expression.

"You have no idea how glad I am that I didn't make you dinner all those years ago, Foo Foo Cuddlypoops," he choked out as his chest heaved painfully.

As if having waited for the action to cease, some of the men woke with painful grunts, the majority of their wounds being from blunt-force trauma rather than the likes of the cleavage Sokka received on his shoulder and chest.

"I didn't expect that," one of the men sitting upright grumbled, and Sokka wasn't sure if the other man was referring to the badger-mole attack or the saber tooth moose-lion rescue, but he would have agreed regardless. The animal in question seemed very nonchalant about the entire ordeal, slowly walking away to clean its wounds in privacy, as if satisfied in a debt repaid. Apparently they were dependable beasts. Sokka vowed to himself that he would, before his last breath, find another that wouldn't kill him and to try his luck. He had always been slightly jealous of Appa's loyalty, not necessarily because of his unparalleled transportation abilities, but because of his reliability as a friend.

"I didn't either," Sokka finally agreed. His chest still throbbed, and he figured that it probably would all the way to Kyoshi Island and back, and he would probably wear the scar for the rest of his life, but strangely, it didn't bother him. The world is always turning, and a bit of pain and a nasty scar is a fair price for a lesson learned and an interesting story told.

- —** — **— -

**A/N: **So I don't know what the hell this story is. I wanted to get it done before I graduated, but considering it's 1 AM technically two days after, you can tell how well that turned out. I started it as practice with interesting words and it snowballed into something much larger, mostly because during the writing process, I discovered that an older, slightly mysterious and slightly lecherous Sokka is such a _sickeningly _interesting character to me that I don't know if I'll stop writing for him any time soon. I might continue this story, considering the openings I left for a longer plot. Who knows.

If you're a reader of _Providence _and you've got a shred of interest, it's not a dead story (nor will it be). It's just those damn Trinket scenes that are killing me. Who knew I was so abysmal at writing for Aang? I'll get it done, and hopefully as I do so, I'll get a grip. Seriously. It's kind of annoying how difficult the Spirit World chapters are turning out. Anyway, thanks for reading, and if any of you know a beta that would be willing to help me on a project like _Providence_, a PM would be much appreciated.


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